I do not know, nor do I care, how the Internet works.
If you don’t know a TCP/IP stack from a stack of pancakes, don’t feel too bad there. Even Steve Ballmer (current owner of the LA Clippers and one time right-hand man to none other than Bill Gates (who also wasn’t all that in the know about TCP/IP stacks either back in the day)) didn’t know what a TCP/IP stack was either. He hollered at his subordinates and engineers and boss at Microsoft back in the halcyon days, no doubt in his late night TV infomercial vocal stylings to build one because his customers were clamouring for one. So thus (and the actual story is a little more convoluted than that) Internet Explorer was born. ((And somebody I’m sure some pedant will point out to me that Mosaic preceded IE and that it’s the ancient ancestor of the Firefox browser that the more sensible among you use….which is also an oversimplification of what transpired….but why let the facts get in the way of the truth, yes?))
To be honest, you really DON’T want to know how the internet actually works, even if, and especially if, it’s your job to know. Trust me on this. You absolutely do not want to know.
So that saves me some trouble here. I can now get on, over the next several days, to the metaphorical matters at hand.
Packet Reflection Detected.
Sports is, at times, more about decision making than about actual athletic ability. It’s more of a mind game than people think or realize. We focus so much on how talented a player, a coach, or a team is, that we, meaning most average sports fans, overlook the most important factor in athletic be in soccer, motorsports, of the NFL. The mental aspect of the game, which includes the emotional aspect of the game, trumps talent almost all the time.
Take the case of Steven Gerrard in Liverpool’s match today with ManU(re) today at Anfield.
This is Gerrard’s final season at Liverpool where he’s been a stalwart for the past 17 seasons. He’s been one of the best midfielders ever and no one, not even the most butt-hurt Liverpool hater can doubt his greatness and contributions to Liverpool and the English game. But time is no longer on his side and when the current EPL season wraps up this May, Gerrard is off the MLS ((the EPL retirement home)) to play for the LA Galaxy.
So today’s match was to be his final one against Liverpool’s hated rival Manchester United. Gerrard’s form this season has not been top shelf so Brendan Rodgers did no give him the start. His replacement, Jordan Henderson got the start, and the Captain’s armband. But Rodgers was going to give him a run out, and at halftime Adam Lallana was hauled off, and Liverpool’s stalwart, Steven Gerrard trotted out the tunnel with the captain armband to lead his team to glory despite being down 0-1.
But less than one minute later, Gerrard tossed the armband back to Jordan Henderson, and trotting (well walking, actually) back down the tunnel. It was a straight red card for a spiteful stomp to the leg of ManU(re)’s Ander Herrera.
Packet reflection, combined, no doubt, with stack overflow. And a glorious chance to go off the pitch at the end of the match with glory and acclaim disappeared like little pieces of data that took a peek in the mirror and were scared by what they saw.
Why did this happen?
Frustration, quite likely, at not playing as much this season and also at not getting the start. Emotion most certainly…after all it’s his last game ever at Anfield against United.
But there it was, a moment of madness instead of a moment of glory. A thus, a legend of the game was gone in less than sixty seconds.
Was My Compuserve member number 191026.1811@compuserve.com….or was it….?
As I mentioned, Bill Gates and Co. started the TCP/IP Stack Wars with absolutely nothing. No Army, No Bullets. Nothing. Like most of you, these geniuses didn’t even know what a TCP/IP stack was. But they marshaled their forces….ahem…purloined their forces, press-ganged the work of others, and eventually won the first War, just because they had the ultimate mind game, Windows, on their side. Remember, Windows is not a real operating system. But since everybody thinks it is (or has forgotten that it isn’t), then it is. So Mozilla/Netscape went down to defeat. And the ultimate mind game on top of a mindgame, Internet Explorer, took sway on every computer that had Windows riding on the back of the DOS turtle embedded with in it, which despite Apple fanatics protestations to the contrary, was pretty much every computer…..sort of like how recently, Bayern München usually has the Bundesliga all wrapped up by Valentines Day or Lent most seasons. Or maybe how ManU(re) had the Premier League pretty well cinched up season after season under Lord Ferg. Switch Lord Ferg’s Flaming Hairdryer with Steve Ballmer’s Flaming Hairdryer salesmanship, and you get what I mean ((assuming you get what I mean)).
So it’s funny to me, and maybe 37 other comedians, that the winner of the first TCP/IP stack wars is hanging up it’s boots and retiring from the game. During the course of it’s career, the vanquished One, Mozilla/Netscape, arose from the ashes and became Mozilla/Firefox swiftly and overtook the victor and left it in the dust…gasping to catch up and regain it’s dominance which it never did. Firefox, then Chrome, and others based on or in real operating systems, turned IE from the Spain/Germany of International football, into, well….not quite the San Marino or Bhutan of International football, but, say, the Lithuania of International football who merry old England beat yesterday 4-0 in their Euro 2016 Qualifier. In any case, it’s all about mindgames.
Chelsea haters, which seems like pretty much everyone who doesn’t Keep The Blue Flag Flying High, would no doubt find this pretty much par for the course. ((Hmmm…golf cliche/metaphor invades the pitch. Onward…)) Jose Mourinho, after all, is the master of mindgames. He keeps his two biggest rivals, Arsene Wegner and Manuel Pellegrini, tied up in tautological knots. He then builds an Us vs Them mentality which can, I’ll admit, even get a bit tiresome at times even for True Blue fans like myself. It’s Chelsea against The World….or rather, it’s The World against Chelsea. All the enemies, real and imagined….the Referees, the FA, UEFA, The Premier League, Pundits, the Media, are in a constant conspiracy against Chelsea…even when the real problem is as simple as a mistyped punch card, or a fucked-up line of code—in other words, Oscar was momentarily sleepwalking and got knocked off the ball…or Ivan and Cahill were caught ball-watching and Abel Hernandez swept by them for the score. Or it was a line of .php code placed within the wrong <div>…as for example, Costa was brought down in the area, but the howled for pelanty was not given because it appeared to the ref that Costa had tripped over his own shoe (ie. fell to floor of his own volition but not egregiously so). It was all the Refs against us….Costa should have won the pelanty and Chelsea would have got the win instead of the draw…..that sort of imaginary scenario arises from the mindgames.
Of course that could never happen. Like all refs, all code is perfect, yes?
But check your watch just in case, to see, speaking of mind games, if it’s still running on Fergie Time.
Despite our digital predilections, it is still, at heart, an analog world.
Find the TCP/IP Stack in this picture
In soccer, as in all other sports, but more so in soccer than in all other sports, it’s the weakest link on the pitch rather than the strongest, who usually determines the outcome of a game. But instead of a soccer example, a more readily accessible example of this for those of you sporting drunkards who think the NFL is football instead of the EPL, would be the Packers NFC Championship loss to Seattle.
Brandon Bostick knows this home truth, now anyway. He was the galoot that made an error that no true Packer’s fan will ever forget. He cost the Packers the Championship game, quite likely the Super Bowl, and along with it cost the team and his fellow teammates millions of dollars. Needless to say, he is no longer a Green Bay Packer.
It’s a pity we ((as for we, I mean most all of us who aren’t hardcore Apple or Linux fanatics and other, similar butthurt dwellers)) can send Microsoft on a one-way all local stops universal serial bus ride back to where it came from.
But for the moment there’s noting we can (nested) do (loop) but rail about it.
There even might be a weakest link in this little setup, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US" prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#"> <head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <meta name="google-site-verification" content="D5AdiO_6DNPqTbPQS73CJQFZHGTP3t2Dj11xS12LJt0" /> <meta name="msvalidate.01" content="DD35775CDEE8D72C20FA27A1488EE499" /> <title>The TCP/IP Stack Wars, Cont.</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="http://www.themagicworld.org/bloog/wp-content/themes/simple-catch/style.css" /> <link rel="pingback" href="http://www.themagicworld.org/bloog/xmlrpc.php" /> <!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v2.0 - https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ --> <!-- Admin only notice: this page doesn't show a meta description because it doesn't have one, either write it for this page specifically or go into the SEO -> Titles menu and set up a template. --> <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.themagicworld.org/bloog/?p=8374" /> <meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" /> <meta property="og:type" content="article" /> <meta property="og:title" content="The TCP/IP Stack Wars, Cont. - Whose Shake Is This!!?" /> <meta property="og:description" content="I do not know, nor do I care, how the Internet works. If you don’t know a TCP/IP stack from a stack of pancakes, don’t feel too bad there. … Continue Reading →" />
Whose Shake Is This!!? –Mozilla Firefox (Not Responding)
Sometimes it’s strongest link that can suddenly become the weakest. Even the great ones, Theobault Courtois, for example can make a mistake and allow someone like, say Ahmed Elmohamedy to score a cheap goal. Almost like Integer Divide by Zero….though I haven’t seen that error message in quite some time, have you?
More likely in my case is the above referenced Not Responding to System, which in some cases is the result of an issue with Shockwave Flash, but more often, as I’ve discovered, it’s the result of the svchost.exe (network svcs) process using enormous amounts of RAM for no good or apparent reason.
So here are my choices at the moment while the aforementioned process kicks the ball back and forth across the pitch like any number of football teams have done to waste time at the end of the game:
Which one do I choose?
1. Watch the Euro 2016 Qualifier between Netherlands and Turkey.
2. Eat a Black Forest Ham sandwich with Swiss Cheese, Celery, and Cheesy Puffcorn.
3. Obsess about my Euro 2016 Qualifying Fantasy Football Team.
4. Drink another Okocim. ((as it clearly states on the can, it’s an O.K. Beer))
5. All of the above.
